Last week I spoke at the IxDA conference in San Francisco. A number of people asked for a copy of the talk + slides. It’s not verbatim, but near enough. Based on feedback the running order has changed. Download the slides here.

On the ground with a large team working out of three cities in the Kingdom, one fascinating topic to explore, for a commercial client that is looking to launch in 2015.

]]>http://janchipchase.com/2014/12/project-up/feed/0Falling in love for the first time, againhttp://janchipchase.com/2014/11/falling-in-love-for-the-first-time-again/
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Why do you remember certain experiences? What do you want to remember and why? What if you could experience falling in love for the first time, again?

What aspects of experiences do you remember accurately, what aspects blur, and what is forgotten? What are the triggers that reinforce your recollection? What you’ve done? With whom? How do those memories make you feel?

How do the triggers for those memories change over time? Who controls those triggers? How precise are those triggers today, and in what time frame will they become uncannily precise?

Our captured and shared experiences shape who we are, who we want to be. What happens when the memories of those experiences can be manufactured, propagated, and shared as easy as a ‘gram is today?

~

Today you pay to connect. Tomorrow you’ll pay to disconnect.

Today you pay for experiences. Tomorrow you’ll pay for the memory of those experiences. And the day after that, you’ll pay to forget.

Some of you have seen glimpses of D3 prototypes over the past three years. It’s been my go-to luggage for extended travel – from Afghanistan to Brazil and and then some. Three years of hand luggage, a nuanced appreciation of context and place.

This started out as a need for custom luggage that suited the kind of travel and contexts that you’ve seen documented on this site. It’s early days, but from the feedback we may have created something that goes well beyond that. Pay attention to the journey and the company you keep and the destination takes care of itself.

As a side note – the D3 photo shoot took place in Bolivia while scouting new projects for Studio D and acclimatising for an ascent on Huayna Potosi (only made it to alt 5.6k, beaten back by a storm, good excuse to go back). Didn’t expect the detour to the salt flats to be so photogenic.

Some of you have talked about taking your own product journey. My own journey was inspired by Abe at Outlier.

A private speaking gig in Koln, dropped off family in Berlin for a few days, and on to London.

Spent 30 minutes on the platform watching the wheeled hordes trundle by, and then this happened.

]]>http://janchipchase.com/2014/10/en-route-2/feed/0Connectivity is not binary, the network is never neutral.http://janchipchase.com/2014/09/connectivity-is-not-binary-the-network-is-never-neutral-2/
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It takes an hour to clear the Yangon traffic, and another two to reach Bogale, a small town at the edge of the Irrawaddy Delta. From there, depending on which village you are planning to visit, the captain requires up to three hours of skilful boatmanship to navigate the monsoon swollen tributaries before reaching landfall.

For ourteam field-testing a new financial service for poor farmers, it makes for a long working day (western looking foreigners are not allowed to stay overnight in the villages, and we’re a hybrid local and foreign crew so we need to return to a registered guesthouse in Bogale at the end of the day). I’m in the country to wrap up the project and scout what’s next.

I’ve been tracking life at the edge of the grid for more than a decade and although the challenges of connecting people sound the same, every trip offers up a new angle on what connectivity means to the locals: its impact on gender roles in India; the rise of love-marriages in Afghanistan; a more level playing field for favela dwellers in Brazil; a stable point of contact in Nigeria; the list goes on. Here in the delta some villages have a slither of cellular connectivity (rarely data), but many do not. Ask any of the farmers which person in the village has a mobile phone, and they’ll reel off the exact names: the novelty of ownership and shared use of devices is prevalent so it makes sense to maintain a spatial awareness of who has what. My hunch is that when device ownership hits 40 people in a village of 1,000, the need to track who has what becomes less important, it takes on an air of ubiquity.

In Bogale 2,500 Kyats ($2.5) will buy you a rechargeable battery that can power a home for two short nights. 40,000 Kyats ($40) will buy a new car battery, that can last for a month. In places with no or unstable electricity the spread mobile phones creates informal markets for power but it’s not cheap. “I won’t use my smartphone to watch videos if I know there is no electricity — it costs too much.” Ten dollars a month spent on power is out of the price range for a farmer earning $1.5 a day (yes solar is becoming more prevalent, but its not quite ready for this demographic). Here the cost of watching a movie on a smartphone, a use case that is prevalent elsewhere, is not measured by the cost of obtaining content but by the cost of replacing the power required to view that content.

Connectivity is not binary. The network is never neutral.

Two short flights from Yangon and you’re in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State. Despite this being an internal flight, an immigration official symbolically checks my passport on arrival. This is a restive region with years of fighting between the local Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Burmese army, although a ceasefire is expected soon.

The town sits at a cross-roads between India and China and lies well off the tourist trail. I’d originally planned to hire a driver and explore the road that runs between both countries but only a few places can be visited without a permit and many are off-limits. Extending the trip by a few days provides a chance to learn about a region our studio needs to better understand and to get back into the rhythm of writing. Myanmar has been universally friendly but there’s a slight edge on the streets as people size up the obvious foreigner in their midst. Smile, haircut and shave, play the tourist. Only at midnight does the heat subside to something manageable, and in a local bar an organist is entertaining Chinese businessmen on their third round of beers. They are most likely here for gold, teak or jade.

Conversations with local students echo what we’ve seen elsewhere in the country, high smartphone adoption (including many high-end devices) and significant peer to peer content sharing through Zapya. When you buy a new phone here it comes preloaded with whatever content you ask for, the only limit being the amount of memory you can afford. But there is still friction in the process. Most new, and therefore desirable content comes from VCD and DVDs (and tape cassettes!) and as one student put it “We don’t have internet at the university. We don’t even have computers”. Rip, burn, mix starts with a device that can play the media you want to rip from.

The cellular network was omnipresent in the town, but I didn’t managed to get a slither of data connectivity until the small hours. “The government restricts internet access here, it is a stronghold of the opposition.”

On the surface it’s aims are laudable Every one of us. Everywhere. Connected, it is set up to serve people such as the farmers and students I’ve met on this trip, those who will significantly benefit from basic connectivity. The sentiment of my peers, including conversations with some Facebook employees is that Internet.org’s intent is closer to Every one of us. Everywhere. Connected to Facebook. Feeding the Beast, a solution to a growth strategy that was hitting natural limits, and a flag in the distant sands for stock-vested troops to charge towards.

I’ve been here before. At Nokia the commercial success of entry products (low cost devices, that at a rough estimate accumulatively sold close to 1.5 billion units) was turned into a “connecting people” story, and my team’s research providing a human angle to that arc. I’ve seen what gets exaggerated and by whom, and where the real and underreported impact lies.

What will be the impact of Internet.org?

It’s early days, but Facebook’s new app provides “free” internet access to a range of services, and will have significant appeal in the countries where it can cut a deal with operators. “Free” is a compelling proposition in any country. “Free” is utterly compelling proposition in highly resource constrained communities. But that’s only part of the story.

At Studio D we talk about “next billion clients”, organisations that are targeting lower middle class to the base of the pyramid consumers in so-called emerging markets. Many clients are significantly over optimistic of the value of their products, a few (including a number in Silicon Valley, that had significant success in other areas) are downright naive to the design choices they should make. As a creative consultancy we can add value in the usual ways: research, design and strategy. However, the place where the most work is needed is how our clients frame their relationship to these consumers. There’s a long way to go. Sometimes the journey starts with a ride out into the delta.

Working in Myanmar this past year (and heading out there again shortly) was a good prompt to write up and publish a piece that’s been stewing for a while. It’s a method and approach and somewhat of a philosophy called pop-up studios that tries to address many of the issues related to corporate field work: whether for design, research or strategy. I’ve been exploring this topic for over a decade and it finally feels like it’s coming together.

Most of you reading this are sophisticated banking customers: you expect instant access, online apps, notifications, analytics and not a little delight. But imagine not having access to any of that. Imagine having to carry all your wealth on your person, or hide it in your home.

When people talk about “banking”, they often lose sight of its core value proposition: take money out of circulation and keep it somewhere safe where it can accessed at a later date; access to credit; and to pay for things. After those three features, the benefits of banking are largely incremental. But to not have these three things, makes life very tricky. Rudimentary banking services (so-called financial inclusion) can help pull people out of poverty.

Myanmar is a country with very low formal banking penetration, but changes are afoot: it will soon have its first country-wide 3G network; there is significant inwards investment, an impending development of more stable, flexible financial policy and a stock exchange in 2015 that will stimulate domestic financial activity.

In March this year a team from Myanmar-based Proximity Designs [http://www.proximitydesigns.org], frog [http://www.frogdesign.com] and strategy consultancy Studio D Radiodurans [http://www.studiodradiodurans.com] mapped the changing financial landscape in Myanmar. Over the two month project — funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion [http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/]— we explored the diverse financial landscape for the poor in Myanmar and uncovered the nuances of income and loan cycles. We mapped behaviours around and attitudes to savings, investments, loans and transactions. We also explored the duality of development, how the poor balance their culture and beliefs with the advancement and globalisation of Myanmar, and how it has impacted their current lives and their outlook for the future. It’s a journey that takes in betel sellers, monks, motorbikes, goats and a lot of gold, with not a little of the afterlife.

The report identifies thirteen findings and twenty one insights, as well as a number of opportunities for future products and services. It aims to provide a foundational reference for organisations wishing to develop products and services for financially constrained consumers in Myanmar.

Some of the findings map to what is known in other markets albeit with Myanmar characteristics that are unique to the locale. For example motivations for not defaulting on a loan varies by culture, person, context. In Myanmar, a devout Buddhist borrower defaulting on a loan would placing a heavy burden on them and their family not just in this life, but also in the next. We also learnt the significance of the novitiation ceremony in the life of a devout Buddhist Burmese, an event that result in them spending as much as US$1,700 at once, even though they earn less than $US1o a day.

After four years as Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at frog I left.

I feel fortunate to have contributed to something as dynamic and interesting at a particular moment in time in that company’s history. It is definitely the right time to go.

My principle has always been that if someone more junior can do some of what I do, they should step up in order to grow. This approach naturally puts a time limit on my role which suits me just fine. It has been rewarding to take on one of the few global roles in an organisation that by its very DNA is based around the gravitational pull of studios and I’m grateful to Doreen Lorenzo (previously frog President, now President at Quirky) and Mark Rolston (previously frog Chief Creative Officer and my boss at frog, and now founder of Argo Design) for the space to figure out what that role could be. I’m also grateful for the many colleagues that have inspired me including Robert Fabricant (my other boss at frog, recently resigned), Paul Pugh (formerly VP software, now at Amazon), Tim Leberecht (previously frog CMO, now CMO at NBBJ), Fabio Sergio, Rainer Wessler, Ravi Chhaptar (recently resigned), Aric Cheston and Nick de La Mare (previously ECDs and recent co-founders of Big Tomorrow), Katie Dill (recently joined airbnb), David Sherwin, Reena Jana (recently joined IBM), Kristina Loring (now at NPR), Rayna Wiles (recently joined Westfield Labs) and Cara Silver (recently joined Google X) plus a few others. As you might imagine losing a significant amount of talent in six months radically alters the DNA of what the organisation stands for and what it can achieve.

People are the lifeblood a consultancy. Its ability to charge a premium to clients is predicated on the assumption that it has the best talent, the smartest processes, the most precise tools, and can operate at a scale and apply the right experience and creative nous to getting the job done. A consultancy might (but by no means always) pull it off if it has the talent and everything falls into place. But any consultancy that cannot retain or attract talent that binds it all together is in trouble.

A number of presentations this week to talk about the Japanese edition of Hidden in Plain Sight (published as “Silent Needs” un Japan). The following deck from the a workshop at Design Hub, on Designing for Social Impact.

Another week in Myanmar draws to a close. Today’s studio visitor summed up what we’ve achieved here: to create a space that is truly in tune with thinking and discussion and sense making and building, time with the team, time alone on the butterfly treetop deck to reflect and that while we’re all focussed on the end goal that it does’t look or feel like work. Assuming we deliver (and you never know until it’s done) this is the highest accolade. It’s also why it’s better to have the kind of clients that appreciate the nuances of quality (deliverables, training, communications, and a more aligned, recharged team), a business model that makes it viable, and to be able to pull on the best and most committed people for the job, wherever they may be. Which if it doesn’t challenge you worldview means you’re either there already or are with the wrong company.